To Make A Mountain - 1: Why Nobody Has The Time

We're clinging to the foam on a cappuccino, and other unsettling analogies.

Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about curiosity, attention, wonder, and delightful oddities like multicoloured towers of light you can see at night, even though they actually don’t exist.

First, some brutal honesty: nothing I’ll be writing today will be anywhere near as good as these birds made from rescued vintage typewriters, so if this is where you stop reading, I totally understand:

Mike Sowden @Mikeachim

Next time you see a discarded vintage typewriter, tell artist Jeremy Mayer - he'll bring it back to life as a bird. (From thisiscolossal.com/2022/06/jeremy… h/t worderist.substack.com/p/all-too-ofte… by @hannah_bo_banna)

Now I have the attention of exactly none of you, let’s turn to today’s mindbender of a theme.

During season 5 of EiA, I’m writing mainly about two things:

- [for everyone] The weird & mind-bending science of colours (what they are, what we think they are, what they do to our poor unsuspecting minds, and other brain-knotting shenanigans.

For example, the women who might have the ability to see a hundred times more colours than the rest of us.

- [for paid subscribers only] A look at how geology, that allegedly ‘old-and-dead-and-over-with’ thing, is currently affecting our lives in hugely impactful ways we rarely think about - starting with how artificial mountains are now being used to engineer new climates.

(Yes, really. That post is available for everyone to read, if you want to go do that. Proper mad sciencs.)

In a few days I’ll be writing about the colour of longing, desire, hope, and - uh, a miserable, painful death (!) thanks to a German law that outlawed a particular shade and labelled it “the devil’s colour” in 1654. (It’s also my favourite colour. Draw your own uncharitable conclusions accordingly.)

But today, I’d like to take you up my nearest mountain - a great slab of a thing nearly 1,000 metres high. It’s a dramatic profile against the horizon at sunset, and, as mountains have a habit of doing, it looks like it’s been here forever.

In fact, it’s a relatively recent visitor to these parts. It’s from the southern hemisphere, from roughly the same latitude as New Zealand. And this is because (gnnnn) it seems mountains migrate.

Here’s the science my brain wasn’t quite ready for.